The latest addition to the KDE web family is already a few days
old and in search of enthusiastic women coders, writers and designers.
The new KDE-Women website has set
out to do this and much more. The stated goal of the website:
"We want to build an international KDE forum for women by providing a
place where women can present what they already contribute to KDE and
where
women, who want to contribute, find a starting point. But the content on
these pages is not only for women but for everybody. By doing this
project
we actively want to contibute to the success of KDE." At the
website
you can already find tutorials,
a big bag of KDE/Linux tips &
tricks, a schedule of events, and more. If you are interested in our project, you can subscribe to
themailing
list
or simply chat with us on channel #kde-women at irc.kde.org.
You can also look forward to meeting some of us at the upcomingevents in Germany.

Your translation is not very accurate. A more accurate one would be "The most important thing is that the emancipation is shown off", which is not necessarily a negative comment and the ;) implies some tongue in cheek.

OK, but why separate ? We do not need to be separated according to certain human attributes. What will be next ? Maybe KDE-AfroAmericans or KDE-AmericanIndians ? Really, why do we need this ? Yeah, we need everyone to contribute: women, American Indians, Chinese, Japanese, whatever (we do not care about those human attributes), but it's not necessary to be divided...

Why is it divided? It is only divided in that KDE is currently a predominantly male project and KDE is currently not experiencing as many contributions from the full community as possible. KDE-Women is out to rectify that.

> OK, but why separate ? We do not need to be
> separated according to certain human attributes.

KDE already serves a number of divergent communities with different resources. For example, there are a number of different-language KDE sites for people who speak different languages. There is a site for artist, one for games, one for multimedia, etc. If there is enough interest to address any specific niche in the "global" community, and someone wants to fill it, more power to them!

As to the analogy to an African or Native American KDE site, I see no problems with that either. Just like a University can have a Women's/black/whatever club, so can KDE. And I would note that the site is not excluding anyone.

I don't want to troll here, but I think that might be the case. As you know there are a lot more male than female geeks around, setting up such a site can only help women to get that little push in the back to get involved (or at least a good place to start). I for one don't mind having that site around at all !

Assuming that Katie is Konqi's girlfriend forces the potentially liberated woman into the stereotypical subserviant gender role of slave to the so-called dominant male.

Why should Katie not be strong enough to survive and thrive on her own? If she is truly liberated, perhaps she should HAVE a girlfriend rather than BE a girlfriend of the so-called man.

BTW- I think the whole KDE-Women is a crock. It just pushes stereotypes more and more. But my opinion doesn't count in this debate, because I have a peepee. Now if this were just a way for desparate KDE developers to get dates....

I would love to join KDE-total-loser-needs-a-date-and-a-shower. Let me know when we have our own websit. Oh wait, that exists at Slashdot.

quote:
>Assuming that Katie is Konqi's girlfriend forces the potentially liberated woman into the stereotypical subserviant gender role of slave to the so-called dominant male.

Wrong assumption konqi is katie's friend . And konqi is a bisexual hermaphrodyte, so katie will probably have no time for coding left because she has to continually take care of konqi complicated psychological disorders because of that.

No, this is not the first project run by women. There is linuxchix.org, some mailing lists (like the german lynn-list) and running titles in linux magazines (as in Revista do Linux, a brazilian magazin).

i knew about those.. i was thinking more about women doing what you're doing - getting involved in a major project and organizing themselves. I have a feeling women have a much harder time than men to be taken "seriously" (if a girl is involved in the OSS scene it is often assumed her S.O. is a "real" coder and she's just there for his sake and/or that she only does artwork or html.) so womens advocacy groups are very important.

If women and men truly treated each other equally there wouldnt be a need for genderspecific groups, but we rarely do. Men are probably much worse (we're just now (last 50 years or so) getting into our think heads that women arnt just pretty things that cook)

Btw, thanks for the tips page - i had no idea what that little X next to the location: field was =)

I want to start a club for males with lactating breasts that feed their children. Any takers?

Being serious for a second, distingushing the female coders from the male coders is stupid in my opinion. Distingushing is nothing more than seperation and seperation leads to discrimination (seperate but equals does not juve in the courts you see). Why embrace the differences? Instead of gender specific clubs we need non-gender specific clubs. Gotta go, the young one needs fed.

I think it's a STUPID thing to create a separate group to show the KDE work done by women.

Women spend it's whole life talking about something called "INTEGRATION", but now they want to be separated from men in the KDE project, what a madness!. KDE is a project belong to none, but to everybody.

Hey,man, could somebody give me a manual about "How do those pretty things called women run?"?. I'm getting a terrible headache with all this biz.

By the way I want to create a KDE-spanish-dark-haired-brown-eyed-medium-built, can I ?, can I ?... XD

Chill .. it doesn't do any harm. If segregation had been forced on them, then that would be something to get excited about. But that isn't the case. They have chosen to do something for themselves for their own benefit, and that is their right!

Many wars have been fought the world over for freedom of thought, speech and expression. For womens rights just as much as mens. It is not our place to criticise how someone else chooses to articulate this choice.

Somehow the total misunderstanding of some guys posting here doesn't surprise me at all. All they're shouting is "Why seperate women from men !! Why !! I want women around !". Well, ok, not the last part (but that's what I reckon they would like to add :). Unless they actually have a founded opinion about matters like these I would just tend to ignore them.

I've said it before. I'll say it again. The worst thing in open source is not what people involved in open source do... it is what people complain about others doing instead of getting involved doing themselves!

If women feel empowered because of this that is a good thing. I recently read the only place in the US where the ratio of women to men was lower than in Alaska is silicon valley. Take a hint. Most women are too intimidated to get past the technical jargon and paradigms. Men also generally seem more naturally inclined to visualize design in empty space. However while differences between the sexes may affect one's tendencies they do not in any way limit their potential!

So six months or a year from now when you are enjoying that seriously cool app, or the forehead slapping new feature on your old favorite you should stop... because KDE women could have worked on it.

If you look at the list of KDE developers how many are women? This is not some dumb government employment quota. This is more like a club. It is the most logical group to focus on the obviousl disparity of involvement between men and women. It is not targeted at exclusion by gender or race (they say they welcome men but I'm not doing the dishes) it is focused on inclusion and on a more equitable inclusion.

It is good to question new things... but not so good to critisize without really considering them.

There aren't as many female coders compared to male coders; therefore, any attempt to introduce or allow females to increase their presents in the technical community, especially Open Source, then this is a superb move.

To me, the reason for males to reject this movement is because males don't have these focused attention upon them. There seems to be too many feminist movements, or there are too much talk about women rights; however, this attention on women is rightly due, to some extent.

I am not a feminist, but I think this initiative will yield good results for the technical community at large, if not for KDE alone.

I would like to thank you for creating this site. I've been trying to get my girlfriend more involved in Linux/Internet( the future ). That has been a chore and now, she is getting interested and likes the site. Once again, thanx.

Oh great! Now those dumb Slashdot trolls will think that competive projects like Gnome is not women-friendly just because they don't have a special women website.
I'm expecting yet another day trolled down by Slashdot.

As many other people, I just don't see the reason why would like women to be separated, even if men are allowed in their group. I'm wondering why was it created... perhaps to make it easier for us, the weird guys to find a girlfriend? ;-)

I can understand other kinds of separation like graphics artists, coders, etc. That's done for functionality, to group people with similar skills so they can help each other. Now, where's the purpose of separating men from women? And what's that about providing a place "where women can find a starting point"? Are you meaning that they because of their gender need more help than we do?

Yes, I know, there are few female programmers, and that's sad, but not because they're different, just because some silly people think it's weird that they would like to code. Sadly, the people around you often make decisions about how you have to live your life.